I had the opportunity to present a full-day preconference session on Friday, March 15, 2013 for SQLSaturday #188 in Lisbon, Portugal. This was the first time I have spoken at a SQLSaturday outside of the United States, and I really enjoyed it! This never would have happened without the enthusiasm of fellow SQL MVP Niko Neugebauer, who is a good friend and an all-around good guy!

How can you scale SQL Server 2012? Scaling up is relatively easy (but can be expensive), while scaling out requires significant engineering time and effort. If you suggest hardware upgrades you may be accused of simply “throwing hardware at the problem”, and if you try to scale out, you may be thwarted by a lack of development resources or 3rd party software restrictions. As your database server nears its load capacity, what can you do? This session gives you concrete, practical advice on how to deal with this situation. Starting with your present workload, configuration and hardware, we will explore how to find and alleviate bottlenecks, whether they are workload related, configuration related, or hardware related. Next, we will cover how you can decide whether you should scale up or scale out your data tier. Once that decision is made, you will learn how to scale up properly, with nearly zero down-time. If you decide to scale out, you will learn about practical, production-ready techniques such as vertical partitioning, horizontal partitioning, and data dependent routing. We will also cover how to use middle-tier caching and other application techniques to increase your overall scalability.